Changing Titles in the Titles of WordPress Posts

Damn, damn, damn. I found some posts I wrote before I found Spellbound Online Spell Checker which puts built-in spell checking in Firefox. The word “perseverance” was misspelled in the title. ARGH!

So I had to go back and change the spelling. I quickly learned there is more to fixing or changing a title in a WordPress blog than just fixing the title.

How to Change or Fix Titles in the Titles of WordPress Posts

If you want or need to make a change in the title of a WordPress post, there are several steps to the process.

Find the post with the error in the the title in Manage > Posts and click EDIT.

In the Title form area, make the changes.

Move to the right column to your Post slug section. This is the phrase that appears in your posts URL if you are using permalinks, the default URL structure for many WordPress blogs. If the Post slug section is closed, click on the + (plus) symbol to open the section. The post slug or permalink is a cleaned up version of your post title. Carefully make the appropriate changes in the Post slug form, keeping dashes (hyphens) in between each word, no spaces.

If the error is also in the post section, such as a misspelling, click in the Post textarea box and do one of the two options:

Manually or using an online spell checker like Spellbound, fix the post content from within the Post textarea.

Use a Text Editor to fix the problem in the content.

Select the whole text (Ctrl+A) and copy it (Ctrl+C).

Paste the text (Ctrl+V) into a text editor, not word processing program. Do a search and replace or manually fix the problem text.

Select the repaired content and copy and paste it back into the Post textarea.

The link is changed and the title is changed, and any problems in the post content is fixed, but we still have a problem. Links to that specific post have now changed because you changed the URL address.

For the most part, WordPress can automatically handle the change in the title, though not always. If it doesn’t you have some options if you are using the full version of WordPress. Some of these will also work with WordPress.com blogs.

Search your blog for references to the link and manually change them. Look in your site map, links list, and referring posts.

Look for incoming links to that post and notify these people that the link has changed.

Which is why I mentioned the solution of adding a redirect in the .htaccess file to help direct people to the new link automatically. A pain in the buns, but a solution if a glaring problem exists. Best to catch this early, but boo boos happen.

Hi, found this site via digg, and noticed that the background of your page isn’t set explicitly to white. Users who set a different default background color in their browser will see that color, instead (for example, I see light purple). Easy fix: just add a background-color: #fff; to the body selector in the CSS.

Vincent: WordPress.com bloggers have no control over their WordPress Themes. We can’t change anything in the design elements. I apologize for the author not paying attention to this issue regarding Accessibility Standards. There are ways to overcome the CSS elements, and you are using one that should, so I will dig into this matter soon to see if I can come up with some other methods to help. Thanks for pointing this out to me.

Hi Lorelle
How do you do the post to digg/technorati etc? stuff on this post?

On topic: I don’t do an .htaccess redirect when I discover a typo. Mainly due to the speed with which my popular sites get indexed, but also because my .htaccess file is growing quite large enough as it is.
Instead I follow the following process
1) fix the spelling in the header and the slug
2) create a new post with the original misspelling and slug. The body acknowledges that we made a typo and link to the original post.

An example is at my new site. First post we made a huge typo.

I do this because I’ve been seeing 301 and 404 errors in my logs for years over exactly this sort of stuff and you never know how long somebody’s link will last. Yes 301 is possible but it suits my blog style better.

I experienced this a few times myself. I’m too much of a control freak and a perfectionist to let the slug remain misspelled, so I would change it, and labouriously code the redirect. That started to get old, and my .htaccess was becoming bigger, which slows things down, so I decided there had to be a better way. (This is the point in this infomercial where I try to “sell” you something).

Redirect Old Slugs is a plugin I wrote to address this issue. Upload it, activate it, and forget about it. If you run across a title that is misspelled, change it, and fix the slug too… the plugin will notice the change, and remember the old slug. When someone comes looking for the misspelled version, they’ll automatically be forwarded to the new version. Violà: worry-free title typo corrections.

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